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After Effects Template: Pressured – Explosive Steampunk Logo Opener

For months now I’ve been wanting to do this After Effects template, but two massive factors have been getting in the way. The first one, of course, being the lack of time due to customers, since I do these in my own time, but the second was: Boy, those smoke simulation renders take bloody ages! And there is literally no way around it. No matter how you slice it. It’s like going to jail. You’ve got to do the time. And smoke sims take forever to render. So I finally decided to do the explosion via Trapcode Particular, which I wasn’t too happy about it, but at least I’d be able to release this After Effects template. So I did the whole explosion inside After Effects and it didn’t look too bad, so I decided to render this mechanical boiler ball of pressured madness in 3D and imported into AE and composited a test and it looked really good! I was genuinely happy with how it turned out, granted I could’t render the more realistic smoke sim in Blender like I wanted, but still looking good.

This After Effects template is a whole lot more flexible than it appears on the surface. Many of the elements such as the steam jets and the explosion are in fact separated in layers for a better control of the coloring. And while the explosion cannot be changed by means of the control panel, you can still do this manually, which is why several layers of the explosion were provided in this After Effects template instead of only one. The color of the lights and the logo and the background lights (which also affect the lens flares) CAN be changed via the control panel.
The music, is a modified version of Disaster Zone, from my own music library, which will ALSO be available as an independent stock music track in my store.